I figured it might be worth another look at something I put online earlier in the year, when this blog wasn’t as wordy. It’s relevant, cos I’m back in Berlin, and as you can probably tell, it’s a drawing of Berlin (and y’know, the title of this post might’ve helped too.)

After visiting last winter, and falling back in love with this, the home town of my brain, I did a drawing of a Rubik’s Cube shape with bits of my fave or personally significant parts of the city. Maybe you didn’t see it. Worth a reblog. So if you didn’t see this drawing before and fancy reading some more about its creation, here the contemporaneous* blog post: Mein Berliner Würfel.

*I love this word. Contiguous, too.

(Related to the cube, by the way, is this, an ongoing work of drawing each station of the Berlin U-Bahn. I’ve only done three lines of the network so far, but I suspect there’ll be more soon. I’ve not done much pixelly stuff recently and the desire to do that comes and goes in waves, so once it does, I’m pretty sure this is what I’ll be doing.)

Looking at the cube drawing again, ten months later, it’s easy to see how I was a bit in love with the idea of Berlin at the time. I can tell these things when I look back at my work. There’s a level of detail that only really comes when I’m totally into the idea. It’s easier for me to notice this with the pixel work for obvious reasons. And looking at the folder on my computer, the first version was ten days before the final version, and there’s three or four days off in the middle of the process, which meant something else was more pressing. (I was gonna type real work there, but “work for money” is a more appropriate phrase. Nothing against that side of things, but my ACTUAL real work is things like this. Lying on my death bed/death gutter/death rollercoaster/death wherever-it-happens, I won’t really be thinking of work I did for money as much as work I did for the love of creating things that were expressions of who I am.)

Those moments can be frustrating, eh? I can still clearly remember the feeling of first starting the Web site back in 1999, sat in my bedroom in Upper Norwood. Working in an office all day, then coming home and trying to do as much as possible in the evening. I don’t think I ever put as much effort into something as I did back then. I’m kinda proud of that effort, the lack of sleep, the nights in the pub I skipped to just get home and build the site, drawing more and more, staying awake til 2am every night even though I knew I had to get up in five hours. It was exhausting, but exciting too. And my brain didn’t give me a choice. And that was the feeling I had doing this cube drawing.

Staying with pixelly stuff, the same feeling happened with the Flower drawing*, and in the middle of that process I had a holiday. I started just a couple of days before the holiday, and was so into it, that the holiday felt like an annoyance (it wasn’t, it was lovely. Viva Belize!). I’d done two of the seven sections, all of which were fairly planned out in my head right from the start. (Those sections, if you view the drawing as similarly-sized chunks: space, sky, soil, water table, fossil fuel, outer core, inner core.)

* One thing I’ve noticed is how I am utterly shit at titling things. Flower is such an inappropriate title for that drawing, but I couldn’t think of anything better, and the working title in my head just stuck. Also, titles are kinda ridiculous, aren’t they? I would far prefer to have everything as untitled. But as Prince found out when he changed his name to a symbol, we need to call him something. Same with art.

Maybe this is a common feeling amongst people who do creative things, but with this year’s bigger effort to paint and draw more without using a computer, I find I’m a lot happier to do something and once that is finished, consider the day done, artistically.

Like, yesterday, I finished the painting below around 4pm. Still had a feeling of wanting to do more, but after a wee break, I felt I’d shot my load for the day. I tinkered with a couple of things, but it was obvious that I’d used my mental energy and drive for the day.

I’ve totally lost my thread here. (I went to the kitchen to make coffee, y’see.) Not sure where this post was leading. I had a point but it’s totally gone. What an arse I am.

Oh well, this’ll have to do for now. Maybe I’ll remember and we can pick up from here another day. Soz about that. (Of course, the minute I press “publish” I’ll remember…)

I like thinking about my work. I quite like typing about it. I hate talking about it. I don’t think I’m good at the latter two of those three things, so forgive me. There’s an enthusiasm for the idea of typing about it that probably is missing from this blog post. Again, soz about that.

(Last point. I tell you what I am really enjoying nowadays: going to bed wondering what I might blog about tomorrow, then waking up and just doing it. Thanks for reading.)

The song in my head when I woke up this morningLove Yourself by Justin Bieber. A nice enough song off the last album, not as good as Sorry, What Do You Mean?, or Where Are Ü Now, of course, but not too bad. The video is pretty cool, too. He’s not in it, FYI.